Anxiety Land Two Year Anniversary AND 50th Post!

Hello Friends:

Well, wow. Two years and finally, fifty posts. Two milestones to celebrate for Adventures in Anxiety Land.

Thanks to readers who've been along the whole time, and thanks to those who just started following. Knowing there are people out there reading makes this both a lot of fun and a great way to try to keep myself honest with my own healing.

I'm glad I have been able to keep the blog alive all this time. I'm glad I've been able to keep me alive. The hardest thing to do, and one of the most valuable things I've gotten from this blog, is forcing myself to come back after not posting for a while. You imagine you've ruined it, that you ought to scrap it and start over, rather than deal with the messy reality. Instead, you rev the engine and keep driving.

And speaking of the messy reality, there is data! I love data ...  check this out ...

X axis - months from March 2008 to March 2010. Y axis - Number of posts per month for that month.

When I plotted this, I knew I'd see the huge gaps from when I wasn't feeling up to posting anything. I should have realized that what that means is that this is, literally, a plot of my ups and downs. When I'm happy, I post more. When I'm depressed I post less. Of course there are other factors like travel and such which effect my posting regularity. In fact, there are a few times when I posted because I didn't feel up to doing anything else. Still, I think this is adequate as a rough sketch of how the last two years have gone.

As far as posting, my lowest per month was zero and highest was eight, two posts per week. The total of 50 posts in two years is only 0.48 posts per week on average. At first I was going to get rid of any month with no posts so that I could calculate my 'true' posting average. But then I realized that was, once again, thinking that being depressed wasn't real life. That somehow the down times shouldn't be represented; instead they should be dismissed or hidden. Heck with that. This is my life, such as it is, and it is all 'real life'. So the average is a half a post a week.

When I started blogging, I was hoping to average at least one post a week, even with all my ups and downs. Off by a factor of two, but not an order of magnitude. I'm going to take this as a general 'win', and use this data to target a goal for this year of an average of 1.5 posts per week, including depressed times, travel, and all that stuff there. That would be an intermediate goal heading to my target of two posts per week. I don't want to do more than that because I have a desire to write longer, more involved posts rather than posts that look like tweets. Just my style, and who is going to have time to read more than two of these a week, on average, let alone the time for me to write them?  :)

Other things of note.  The second half of 2008 was clearly a bad time. Also, March is my most prolific posting month. I'm wondering if that has to do with the advent of spring, or with finally getting over of the holidays from the previous year. I can also see reflections of a tough time around some international travel in May 2009, and then around a conference in October 2009. Certainly this last hiatus in the beginning of 2010 was due to backlash from the holiday, and a number of family related issues that got stirred up.

One thing I see looking at this plot is, naturally, the complete lack of any regularity. Not that I want to force myself into anything, but I'm beginning to wonder if some kind of weekly regular feature might not be a good thing to try to institute. Perhaps a weekly look at a paper in a research journal about mental health, or a posting of mental illness terms or trivia? What do you, as a reader, hope to see? No promises, but suggestions are always welcome.

Anyway, thanks again for coming along for the ride. I hope you continue to hang out here in Anxiety Land with me (until that glorious day when none of us feel like we are living there anymore at all!)

Your Hostess With Neuroses

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pinksherbet/ / CC BY 2.0

Plot credit:  Me and my excel program

Your Hostess Has Her First Post

Hello Friends:

Welcome to my first post. Anxiety Land is where I live, and it can be a very strange place as viewed from the outside. Let's talk about how a day starts. Do you get up every day and wonder if you'll be able to use your toothbrush, or have to open a new one? That's how it is here. Toothbrushes can be scary. I've known I was living in Anxiety Land for about 16 years, now, so I've had lots of therapy, done a tremendous amout of work, some meds, and then more work, and so now can say that bad-toothbrush-days have dropped to about once a week. But still, if you have never looked at your toothbrush with suspicion, you probably live someplace very different from Anxiety Land. But stick around ... everyone is welcome, and hopefully this will be eye-opening place, or a thought provoking one, or at least an amusing one. And if you are a resident of Anxiety Land, like me, then Hi! And BTW I can use a Sonicare now. I don't even have to change the brush heads more than 2 times a year. That's a whole heaping helping of therapy at work ...

Your Hostess with Neuroses